If you want to make a tutorial about how to do something in your Windows PC, then it is best to capture the video or animation of that activity. The free LICECap application allows you to record screen activities into a GIF animation. This GIF file can be viewed using any popular image viewer, can be embedded inside a webpage or shared with friends. You can use LICECap to record many things like a chatting session or computer problem etc.
You can download the LICECap from the website of Cockos software. The download is a setup installer using which you can install LICECap on your system. It can be used on any Windows version, but it works best in Windows XP and above. When you run LICECap on your PC, it shows up a window which is the target area of your screen that is going to be recorded. You can resize this window by dragging the corners or by manually specifying the screen size in the text box given near the bottom-left corner.
You can drag the window location to the area of the screen or other window that you want to record. Once that is done, click on the Record button. It would ask you for the target GIF file where the recording is to be saved. After you have selected the file, it would start the recording of activity inside the LICECap capture window. You can stop the recording either by clicking on the Stop button or by pressing the global hotkey.
The following is a sample recordig I made using the LICECap screen capture utility:
Although GIF animations do not contain any audio, but sometimes its better than the videos as the GIF files tend to be very small in size compared to full fledged movie files. The GIF animation I have created above is only 55 kilobytes in size, while the same screen activity captured using Microsoft Windows MovieMaker software turned out to be 5 megabytes AVI movie.
You can download LICECap from http://www.cockos.com/licecap/